


Walhalla (Is Just a Mining Town)

by incendiarylemons



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Awkward Romance, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-01 17:38:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4028815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incendiarylemons/pseuds/incendiarylemons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s hard to look past the outer skin of a War Boy.  They’re terrifying.  Black on white warpaint, marked up like death.  But underneath...  Her ignorance, until now - this boy in front of her, he breathes, he talks, he cries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Combustion

It was the first time she’d ever seen one up close, this War Boy huddled into the lookout chassis.  She’d seen them before, of course, but from a distance.  Her first reaction, to run, to hide, seemed somehow silly now, looking into his sad, watery eyes.  From a distance, in the great numbers of the Citadel, war boys were fierce, furious, something to be feared, and yet here this curious little War Boy was, hiding from her of all people, oh how the tables had turned.

“You tried to kill us,” she stated blankly, for both of their benefit.  She was in the wasteland, now, and it is no time or place for soft things.  She was determined not to be a soft thing.  “Why shouldn’t I do the same for you?”  She determinedly ignored the staunch feeling of wrong, towering over the cowering boy and threatening his life.  This was to be her life now.

“Three times the gates of Valhalla were opened to me!”  The boy on the floor twitched erratically with nervous energy, eyes flickering wildly.  “Three times I failed to pass through them!”  Anemic moonlight shone and cracked against his teeth, flashing wildly with spittle and silver.  “Immortan has forsaken me, and this half-life shall be my last!”  His frantic words confuse her, but the flailing of his body draws her in.  “And now I am faced with you!  Oh, shiny one, I could not ask you to Witness me - look away for what I am about to do, for I am forsaken by God!”

Her hands are on him before his head can hit the tanker for a second time, even if the wrenching force contained between them strains to be free.

“Stop,” she cries, “Stop!” and to her surprise he falls limp in her hands.

“How can I disobey one of Immortan’s own Wives?” he asks, but she thinks not to her.  It seems she’s interrupted some sort of existential crisis,but she can’t allow that to interfere with her own.

“I am no longer a Wife,” she pronounces, straightening where she is knelt.  “I am a Human Being.”  There is a slight pause as she takes a second to look at the apparently docile War Boy.  “And... I think you might be too.”

It’s hard to look past the outer skin of a War Boy.  They’re terrifying.  Black on white warpaint, marked up like death.  But underneath...  Her ignorance, until now.  This boy in front of her, he breathes, he talks, he cries.  She feels a sudden nurturing urge, and even though the wasteland may have no place for soft things...  He looks disbelieving... That he is even a human.

“Look,” she says, leaning further over him as his eyes flicker further, nervous energy releasing as a steady tnk-tnk-tnk of bootsole on metal.  “We’ve both got noses, and ears, and hands,” she says, grabbing his hands for emphasis.  “I can’t think of any animals that have those things.”

“I can think of several Tainted who have extra,” he quips, hands quirking in her grasp.  A long second passes as she struggles with her sense of humour.  It’s funny, but...  “And I am Tainted, Wife of Immortan-”

“I am not that man’s Wife!  And no longer am I a sex object.  I am Capable.”

“Of what?”

“Many things.  Whatever I set my mind to.  I don’t know.”  She sighs, the words imparting a solemn meaning to her as they leave.  She’s vaguely aware that she’s still grasping the War Boy’s hands in her own, her tightly trimmed fingernails stabbing into his fisted hands.  “I’m sorry, War Boy.”  She turns his hand over in her own to pet at the marks she couldn’t even leave in his skin, the warpaint protecting him.  It’s flaking off in places, sandy and cracked and she picks at it idly.  “I don’t know your name.”

He doesn’t even startle this time, apparently so confused by the turn of events that he’s given up resisting.

“Nux,” he grunts out, softly.  “And my mates, Larry and Barry.”

He’s pointing to two growths on the side of his neck, little faces scratched onto them in engine oil, black on white to match his own.  A swell of soft emotion surges through her chest, bubbling violently like sick, eyes watering and body shaking.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says, and means it.  Today her circle of friends - or at least acquaintances - has increased by 40%!  The world is just getting bigger for her.  The sense of freedom is intoxicating.  If she, Wife of Immortan, a Breeder, could escape the Vault, escape the Citadel, then why not befriend a War Boy?  There is something incredibly real, grounding, about the chalky smell of him, the iron tang of the raw metal cab, the constant rumbling vibration of the war rig.  Unwashed and unpresentable for the first time in years, she even takes pleasure in her own acrid scent.  Freedom.  Nothing could jeopardize that.

“Are you going to try again, Nux?” she asks, pinning him down with her eyes.  “To kill us?”  His eyes flicker wildly around the cab looking for salvation, any alternative but to look into her eyes, because then, if he did...

“Oh, Immortan forgive me, but I cannot.”

His whole body seems to deflate, but hers must be filled with air for how light she feels.  One more person, one single solitary human being converted to their cause.  It could change everything.  Nux is sagged against the floor like so much rubbish, and she joins him, face to face, scant inches between them.  What in another situation would be terrifying (don’t think of the past, you’re away from him now, everything is fine) is now fascinatingly innocent.  Capable raises her hand to his cheek to brush at the liquid pooling there.

“You need not ask his forgiveness, Nux.  Immortan was a bad man.”

Nux starts under her, again, but seems unwilling to dislodge her, nuzzling into her touch as he is.  She brushes a thumb under his eye to disperse the last of the threatening tears, and stares at it in amazement when it comes away black.

“Apologies, Up There, such waste, such frivolous waste of water,” he mutters into her wrist, and she shushes him, soothing, staring at the engine grease on her hand.

“I’m just sorry we don’t have enough water to get all this off you,” Capable sighs.  “Or time.”

“Off?” Nux asks, peering at her through ridiculous eyelashes.  “The war paint doesn’t come off,” he clarifies.  “It protects us from the sun and the sand and the wind.”

“And from people?” Capable snarks.  “It’s terrifying.  And is that - did a spray can go off in your mouth?”  She spits a few long, rebellious strands of hair out of her mouth and licks a long, slow stripe up her thumb, engine oil be damned.  The look in Nux’s eyes is wild and anticipatory, like a crowd before the water pipes flow, like a War Boy before a war party.  She smudges her moistened thumb against his chapped lips, and his tongue flicks out to wet them.  Something deep and yearning inside her opens up, a great hollow.  Breeder instincts, maybe.  It feels intensely different from her times with the War Lord.

She doesn’t want to think about it so she concentrates on rubbing the paint away.  Nux interrupts the silence.

“I was Chrome.  Twice.”

Silence.

“And now I’m not.”

“Chrome?”

“The ride eternal,” he clarifies.  “Every War Boy’s dream.  We are awaited in Valhalla.  Immortan Joe lifted me up himself, made me Chrome with his own hands.  He saw everything.  He saw the whole thing.  My own blood bag, driving the rig that killed her.”  Nux shies from her efforts, cringing further into the floor of the cab.  “It’s the long, slow one for me.  I’ll be soft and squishy in no time.”

Capable moves, arm raised, to comfort, to soothe.

“Don’t touch me, Breeder, I am rusted.”

Capable breathes heavily through her nostrils.  In-two-three, out-two-three.

“I am not an object,” she repeats gravely.  “And neither are you.  Are any of us. You’re not an, a worn out engine-block left to rust!”

“Then what am I?!” Nux screams, throaty and raw and sick.

“Why must you be anything?” she yells back in frustration.  “Why can’t you be just a boy?”

They’ve gravitated towards each other even further, snarling and yelling and accusing all the way.  Their foreheads are touching, grit and paint and sweat all intertwined, and the sour stench of spray paint is overwhelming, intoxicating.  The grease around his eyes acts as a counterpoint to their inherent humanity.  It’s as easy as anything to slip her wrists around his shoulders and cradle his neck in her palms.  He stiffens, nervous energy gone but not forgotten.

“How old are you, Nux?”

Blue eyes bare into hers while she waits for an answer.  After an age, he reveals:

“I remember 200 moons.”

Capable nods and tucks her chin to her chest, eyes peering sideways at something unseen.

“I have lived for 210 moons, and been a Prime Breeder for 40 of those.”  She doesn’t resist the shudder that overwhelms her.  Her hands slip from his neck, to rest on his shoulders.  “And you?  How long were you a War Boy?”

Nux grins, a feral curl to his lip.

“As long as I remember.”

His smile hurts her.  She doesn’t know whether to feel sad that he doesn’t realise the tragedy of his situation, or glad that he can revel in that particular brand of innocence.

“And this?” she asks, hands gently tracing the network of scars on his chest.

“The Holy V8,” he replies, fingers intertwining into the familiar sigil of their warlord against his chest, covering the weak, fluttering beating for his heart.  Hi-Octane feral blood is great for the road, but it takes a hell of a lot out of you once it’s run its course.  “Initiation.”

His words are getting less frequent now, and Capable recognises a familiar tremor in his clasped hands.

Her hand joins his in the sanctity of the V8 - sedition!  Trembling and stuttering like an idling engine, the efforts of his day have caught up with him.

“Empty,” he spits out like the dirtiest word, determined to look anywhere but at her.  “Rusted.”

The goddess in front of him offers him the sweetest, clearest water from her own cupped hands and, Immortan forgive him, he is not strong enough to resist his addiction.  He laps it from her, licks the last droplets from her fingertips and, when he is done, presses his lips to the moist flat of her palm.

“Oh, Goddess,” he murmurs into her wrist.  “The soft and squishy must be upon me, how else could I...”

“Nobody is soft,” Capable corrects him.  “And nobody is squishy.”  A second passes, and then, quieter: “And I’m not a Goddess.”

“I guess if I’m Just A Boy,” Nux offers, eyes downcast, “That would make you Just A Girl.”

Capable shrugs, and removes her hands from him.  The cab is suddenly filled with an electrically charged energy, one that she isn’t equipped to deal with.  Her tongue is dry and heavy in her mouth.  He is a Boy, and she is a Girl.  (A Breeder, she doesn’t want it to be true, but she was, is.)  She moves to the back end of the cab and looks through her binoculars, removing herself to a place miles behind them, out of sight, out of mind.

A warm body pressed up beside her seconds later quickly places her mind firmly back on the war rig.  Nux is scooted up next to her, half hanging out of the back window, staring at the V8 of his fingers.

“I guess we’re all Just People,” she mutters to herself, pulling her scavenged (stolen) goggles over her eyes and leaning in to leech what warmth she can in the cold desert air.  If her eyes aren’t always strictly scanning the horizon, as was her duty, and rather analyzing the poor Half-Life creature next to her...  Nobody would know.

They’d hear the war-drums approaching before they saw the cars, anyway.

And they were approaching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first piece of writing in, what, three years? Four? Hope it's shiny enough for y'all. If you're interested in more, batten down your hatches and prepare for a slow burn.


	2. Check Engine Light

Nux ran hot in the night.  At some point, he’d slumped against her in the silence of the cab, and she’d pulled him closer to her, rearranged him so his neck wouldn’t crick.  It had been a long day for her, but longer, she imagined, for Nux.  She knew of the War Boys from Furiosa, of the lives they led.  Half-life and tainted, close to death, with more mouths to feed than there was food, more bodies to rest than there were beds.  Sleep is a luxury, in the Citadel.  Rested, fed and watered, the masses might rise against their leader, but keep them wanting and they’ll follow you forever.

Thus, rather than feel jilted that he’d left her at the lookout position alone, she let him sleep.  The burning heat against her shoulder worries her, though.  Lowering the binoculars she’d been diligently looking through, she turns her attentions to the boy next to her.  His eyes are open, but glazed.  Unresponsive.  She worries, for a minute, that he’s dead, and memories almost threaten to overtake her.  Angharad...  The boy’s juddering dispels her of that notion in quick time.  Dead things do not move.  Or create heat.

She clicks his fingers in front of his face, by his ears, but it’s not sufficiently interesting to get his attention.  Even from inches away, though, her hand can feel heat rolling off the boy in waves like a raging inferno.

She’s heard about this before, of course.  How couldn’t she?  The night fever that leads to the Soft and Squishy.  Droves of War Boys dying in the night, raving and moaning and screaming.  It is the body’s way of fighting infection, she recalls, and disease.  But their bodies are already frail, and more often than not the night fevers work against the boys themselves rather than the Taint.

Nux is burning up, and the sweat of it is running the sickly warpaint off him in drips and damp slicks of whitish ooze.  Furiosa would berate her for wasting precious supplies, but...  She swiftly rips her sinfully decadent bridal wrappings at its bottom hem - less fabric to trip over, now - and moistens it with her canteen.

“Don’t die on me now, Nux,” she murmurs, sweeping the sun-bleached fabric over the swelter of his skin.  The fabric comes back an ashen grey, and she finds the skin previously covered by it not much better off.  Unable to do much else, she repeats the stroking movement again and again, wetting the strip of fabric over and over.  She fancies she sees steam coming off his skin where the precious water touches it, but can’t bring herself to regret the loss of the coveted resource.  Human life would always come first, to her, over material possessions and wealth.

The boy groans into the cloth after the worst has passed.  It’s over quickly, and for that Capable is surprised.  The scourge of the War Boys, and much of the Wretched - the Night Fevers - so quickly remedied?  Boys had died of this en masse, and she can’t help but think...  Had any of them experienced a helping hand?  A protective touch, a nurturing figure with the presence of mind to care, to take care?

Of course not, she realises.  The only figure in these people’s lives, like her own, is - was - Immortan Joe.

It’s not scientific in the least, but Capable is sure that a lot of these deaths could have been avoided.  Such pointless loss of life; the backbone of Immortan Joe’s society.

Maybe minutes have passed or maybe hours but Capable feels an immense weight lift off her shoulders at the first sign of life she sees.

“Nux?”  His eyes flicker slightly, opening from their half-lidded, feverish state.  “Are you with me, now?”

A long, sluggish moment passes in a languid stretch of taut, clammy, bony boy.

“Whazzappnin’?” he growls rough, and she startles at the intensity of his voice, like the grating strings on the Doof Wagon, like the rumble of a V6.

“You, uh,” she chokes out, suddenly reminded of the Immortan with a fierce temper and a terrible imperiousness and a powerful back hand.  “You fell asleep.”  Suddenly petrified at the idea of injuring the boy’s pride, and she knew what men were like, what men did when that happened, she stuffs the ripped hem of her bridal coverings into the wrappings around her waist, and the wet and clay of it gunge up to her immediately.  “Nothing happening,” she blunders on, “They’re not making any ground.”

“But neither are we,” he rasps out through the desert of his mouth.

“No,” she concedes, hands dropping into her lap.  “Neither are we.”  Her fingers long for occupation, for work, but instead they fiddle with the focusing rings on Furiosa’s binoculars as she stares out at the back of the vehicle.  Looking back at the approaching war party is painful.  Her mind blocked out the menacing guitar riffs a fair while ago, but has made no effort to extend the same courtesy to her memory of Angharad.  Straight under the wheels.  Crunch.

“Got oil on you,” she’s interrupted.  Nux is reaching out and she flinches instinctively.  “Just-” he gestures at her face, either perceptive of her discomfort or feeling some of his own.

She rubs at her face with the back of a hand, and he looks pained.

“Up a bit,” he grunts, and her hand smudges grease across her cheekbone.  Furiosa’s binoculars, axle grease, of course.

“...I look like an idiot right now, don’t I?” she laughs with no small amount of self-deprecation.  Nux shrugs.

“Fill those in, you’d make a good War Boy.  Girl.”

She laughs, a little.  His sense of humour resonates with her.  He’d get along well with The Dag, she thinks.

“You’re very kind,” she sketches a tiny, embellished bow from her seated position, and Nux frowns.

“Nah, you said you’re Capable, right?  Of anything?  You could do it.”

She shudders, and Angharad goes beneath the wheels again.

“To take something so precious as a life?  I couldn’t.”

Nux stares at her.

“You’re very sheltered,” he states, eventually, and it’s not an insult so much as it’s a fact.

“Yes,” she concedes.  “Did you know, back in the Before times, everybody was?”

“You’re feral,” Nux blurts out before he realises who he’s talking to.  “There’s no way.  How’d they do war?”

Capable shrugs, and settles in next to Nux again, more at ease with the talking than the silence.

“No idea.  Don’t think there was any.”

“Yer takin’ me for a ride,” Nux decides, and huffs away.  His eyes kind of glimmer with something, though.  “How’d they ever decide anything?”

“Dunno,” Capable shrugs again, and rubs the heel of her hand against the rings around her eyes somewhat sheepishly.  “Toast was always better’n me at Booklearning.”

“Sounds bodgy to me.”

“I like the idea.”

“Yeah, you would, Shiny thing like you.”

She hasn’t got a reply to that.  Maybe he’s right.

“And Valhalla, what about that?  No war, no fighting to take ya there?”

Capable stares at her hands, out the back of the truck, anywhere but at him, at Angharad.

“I guess they just... Died.”  She sighs.  “People do it all the time.  You know there’s no Valhalla for the Wretched, or the Milk Mothers, or Wives.”

The look on his face implies that he didn’t know that.

“We just... Go back to the earth.  There’s something very Pure about that.  And then our bodies feed the Green.  In theory.”

Nux looks at her for a long moment, and she’s very aware of the heat of him centimeters away from her, and the soft sticky mud of her improvised rag against her hip.  Nux tears his gaze away and looks out the back of the rig again.

“Definitely feral.”

Capable feels the heat rushing to her face in indignation, fury bubbling up like the great water well in full production, until she sees the cheeky twist of his lip and the twitch in his cheek, and she realises that he’s not looking at her as a Breeder.  He’s looking at her as a comrade, like a fellow War Boy.

“Ha ha.  Laugh it up, ya dirty piker.”

The grin he gives her makes her cheeks flush, but this time with pride.  She did it.  She is equal.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had some mad trouble with AO3 uploading this. Such a filthy casual. Unbetad as usual. Stay Chrome, brothers and sisters.


	3. Stall

The soft gleam of evening turns to eerie moonlight as they travel onward.  The sand beneath them, the only thing she’s ever known, turns sodden and betrays them, sucking the rig down into its unwelcome embrace.  Capable is awoken from her half-dead staring by a judder and a jolt, and her face very nearly makes violent contact with the metal lip of the lookout point.

“What,” she jerks out, confused and frantic, “What’s happening?”

Nux is already half-hanging out of the back of the lookout, peering down with little regard for Furiosa or The Fool or any of the other, perhaps less sympathetic, wives who might see him, and Capable quickly hooks her hands into one of the many straps on his trousers and heaves.

“Hey!” he slaps her hands off him in a tumble of legs and arms and elbows, “Whaddya do that for?”

“You can’t be seen, remember?” she hisses through gritted teeth.  “Unless you want to be thrown off the rig again?”

He grunts and props an elbow on bent knee, shoving his face into the crook it creates.  The whole rig whirrs angrily underneath them, covering whatever Nux might have said.

“What is that?  Why’s it making that sound?”

When she receives no reply, Capable turns and pokes at his bare side.

“Nux?”

She hears something mumbled into his arm, something suspiciously like “so now you want my help,” but lets it slide as he lifts his head to stare out the back.

“Nux, what is it?”

“How’m I supposed to know, when I can’t even look out the backa the rig, huh?”

The look he levels at her is one shade lighter than condescending, and the vaguest bit confused.

“I’m sorry, Nux,” she placates, hands raised and pleading.  Subservient.  Breeder.  “You can look, but just, carefully?  Furiosa...” she fades off.

Nux nods and all but falls out the back of the cab looking, again.  War Boys and careful are not generally even considered in the same sentence, let alone applied to each other.

“We’ve gone the wrong way,” he growls and terror grips her heart.

“The Green Place,” Capable breathes, reverent.  “You’ve been there?”

Nux looks at her, eyes unreadable.

“Green Place?” he asks, but moves on before she can answer.  “Nah.  Scouted here few times, though.”  The clammy air is rolling in, now, and she’s starting to feel it through her wrappings.  Nux shivers, and she attributes it to that same cold chill rather than whatever dead thing is lurking behind his eyes.  “There’s only one safe way through the Dead Wet.”  Capable can feel the rig protesting beneath her as he talks, and voices drift up to her as her sisters clamber out to do... Something.  “And this ain’t it.”

Capable shudders, the cold around her suddenly menacing and ominous.  The rig jolts forwards under them, then rocks back again just as violently, and she almost catches her head on the cab again as she struggles for a semblance of balance and poise.  The beat of hands against the side of the cab jolts her from thought, and she suddenly scrambles to crawl out.  A hand on her ankle shocks her, and she pulls away with a squeak.

“I have to help,” she states, obvious, and clambers out of the cab, stumbling and jumping, landing in the soft sand with a squelch.  She squeals again a little as she loses her footing, the waterlogged earth underneath her trying to lay claim to her boots, sucking them off her feet.  “No,” she hisses, seeing Nux try and follow her down, “Stay hidden!”

“What did you say?” Toast yells down at from where she’s working trying to wedge a piece of metal underneath a wheel not too far away.

“Nothing!” Capable yells back, eyes pleading with Nux to back down as he shuffles along the top of the rig, mostly hidden from sight.  “I’m stuck!”

Toast is jogging to her, and nearly trips over her bridal wrappings a few times.

“Don’t make the same mistake I did,” she gripes when she reaches her, bending over with her hands on her calves, breathing heavily from the strain.  “Lost a perfectly good boot in the bog just now.  Off with them.”

Capable’s face must betray exactly how little she wants to take off said boots.  The choice is taken from her as Toast nudges her.  She shifts her weight to one foot, moves the other to re-balance, and her boot is left behind, sat quite happily in the mud, from where Toast grabs and throws it into the back lookout cab with impeccable aim.  Grit and grime squelches between Capable’s toes and it feels slimy like the clay at her hip and cold and rancid and gross.

“We can do this the hard way,” Toast says in the deadpan tone of voice that she affects when she’s feeling threatened, and Capable shucks the other boot with little fanfare.  It feels pathetic to complain when Furiosa and her other sisters are digging out gritty mud from under the rig with their bare hands, Dead Wet and determination plastered across their faces.  The Fool is at the wheel, grim-faced and taciturn as usual.

“We need to lose weight,” he grunts eventually when the rig is rocking back into place after another false start.

“We’ve already lost the spares,” Furiosa replies, grave, the extra set of wheels having been rolled off into the distance and lost hours back.  “What else do we have to lose?”

“Cargo,” The Fool suggests, and Capable goes cold with shock at his callousness.  It’s only when he’s out of the cab and heaving open the valve on the side of the rig that she realises she’s not talking about her and her sisters.

“Water?” she gasps, and Furiosa’s face is stone.

“Twenty thousand gallons of Aqua Cola, for Gas Town and The Bullet Farm in equal measures,” Furiosa recites, her voice flat and as devoid of emotion as her face.  “You’ll be burning a lot of bridges.”

The Fool pauses in his movements, any other suggestions burnt into the tense line of his shoulders, the hunch of his back.

“It’s a bartering tool,” The Dag announces glibly from behind the wheel where she’s been pushing at the rig with Cheedo.  “What if we need to buy our way in?  A place that Green, gotta be a price.”

“They got Green, don’t they?” Toast replies back as quick as ever, as if this was a debate they’d had any other day.  “What’d they need our water for?”

They’re bickering and pleading and procrastinating and the precious water is dribbling and the war song is encroaching - violent, bass-ridden, dissonant chords - and Nux is staring at her from where he’s clinging to the top of the rig and she’s staring right back, pleading, and he jumps right down and swings on one lithe arm straight into the driver’s seat of the rig.

And something magical happens.

The rig lurches forward... And it continues to move.

And just like that, Furiosa and The Fool rush into action, one all but ripping the boy out of the driving seat and the other pressing a gun to his neck.  Larry and Barry gaze at her plaintively.

The word “No!” is ripped from her chest before she can even think, and she lurches forward just like the War Rig.  “He wants to help!”

(“War Boy,” The Dag murmurs behind her, somewhere a million miles away, “Thought we got rid of him.”

“An’ why should we trust him?” Cheedo spits, still reeling with the emotions of Angharad’s death, as were they all.

“Trust him or not,” Toast interjects, “Angharad said no unnecessary kills.”

“Angharad is dead!” Cheedo cries, and buries her face into The Dag’s armpit to hide her tears, and that is that.)

Furiosa stares at the War Boy, who seems to be locked into a state of selective muteness.

“He knows the way!” Capable exclaims, and Furiosa’s eyes narrow in synchronisation with an ominous sounding click from the shotgun in The Fool’s hand.

“To the Green Place?” Furiosa asks, or rather interrogates.  Nux shakes his head, partly to disagree and partly just to clear it.

“No, out of the Dead Wet.”  Nux’s hands are in the air, to prove his innocence, or just to remove them from the improvised steering wheel/crossbow.  She isn’t sure which.  “There’s high ground,” he says, words stumbling over each other in their eagerness to get out, “Just behind that thing.”  A hand flickers slightly towards something in the distance and even if Furiosa And The Fool won’t look away from Nux, Capable will.  She sees The Thing - a dead, burned out husk of a tree, the only thing around for miles - and when she squints she can pick out a ledge of darker something against the blurry fog.

“He means that tree,” she blurts out, stepping forward into the ooze as if an extra step’s distance will increase her range of vision, will clear up the fog and let her see their destination.  “There’s a ridge, I can see it.”

Furiosa levels a look at her which she knows means that they will be Having Words in the future, but their safety and retreat from the oncoming forces of Immortan mean more to her than anything else at this moment.  If they reach the Green Place in one piece, she will accept the oncoming well-deserved tongue-lashing with grace and aplomb.

“He can do it,” she says, knowing her fate is already sealed.  “He’s a Rev Head.”

Furiosa looks at The Fool, who looks at Nux, who looks at her.  It’s only when The Fool gives a grunt and a nod that Furiosa removes her metal arm from Nux’s neck.  Like a born leader, Nux starts to bark orders at them and with a new-found sense of cohesion they all move to obey.  Furiosa And The Fool are both strong warriors in their own right, and they seem to move as One, but their communication skills, Capable thinks, with people who aren’t involved in that sacred connection between similarly tortured souls, are woefully inadequate.

Under Nux’s instruction, sheet plating is removed from the rig and placed under the wheels.  Sand is gathered from afar and drained and spread around the rig to provide traction.  They push and they heave and they strain and somehow, miraculously, they move.

And then all hell breaks loose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story, now with 250% more characters! Yes, I did the math. Things will happen eventually, maybe. The Slow Burn.


End file.
